It's All Journalism

On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Steve Buttry, director of student media at Louisiana State University, about a new article he wrote for www.current.org on journalism ethics. They discuss the lines journalists and newsrooms need to draw when it comes to community involvement.

Sometimes the only way to get the tools you need is to build them yourself. Joshua Vaughn is a criminal justice reporter with the Sentinel in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and two years ago he started thinking about the information contained within the court documents created every time a person is charged with a crime. Working with a friend, he taught himself to code and built a tool to search those dockets, creating a searchable database that can provide statistics about the crime rate across the state. “Where it all really started is, we’re like most newspapers, trying to do more with less people,” Vaughn said. “I thought there was a need and there was something there that could help us out. … As journalists, we have our routines, we have our ways of doing things. We have our data set that we look at, whether crime with dockets or education with reporting of Pennsylvania school profiles. There are things we look at all the time that we use in one way. I wanted to find different ways of using it. It was a matter of trying to take a step back and realize this (information) was there if we could find a way to pull it out.” Now Vaughn has been writing one data-driven criminal justice article each month, led by or sourced with information culled from the data scraping tool he created. He wrote an article about people who were arrested on drug-related charges or found to have drug abuse issues when arrested and what happens to those people when they’re sentenced to jail time. “I was doing some keyword searches in documents and found several people in there who had died of drug overdoses” while in jail, he said. In December, he wrote an article looking back at what appeared to be a noticeable uptick in the number of dockets opened in Pennsylvania that year, a 500-case increase in a county that normally gets 3,000 to 4,000 criminal filings each year. While it sounds like a big problem and might be cause for concern, Vaughn used the tool he created to determine things weren’t really that bad. “DUIs are up substantially, drug crime and arrests were up substantially. The largest portion of drug crime arrests were simple possession, small amount of drugs not for delivery, and people getting charged with possession of small amounts of marijuana,” a separate crime in the state, he said. “Those two alone accounted for about 75 percent of the overall caseload increase.” The underlying reason for this increase, he determined, was due to a shift in enforcement. “One of the chiefs of police made the point that the county is going through a shift in work staff, with older officers retiring. Younger officers tend to spend more time on the road and they have to do more traffic enforcement. More traffic enforcement leads to more people getting pulled over for DUIs.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Joshua Vaughn, a criminal justice reporter at the Sentinel newspaper in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Vaughn taught himself coding and built tools that allowed him to scrape data from public records. He shares how this information has both supported the reporting he had been already doing and led to new stories about the criminal justice system.

Sometimes the only way to get the tools you need is to build them yourself. Joshua Vaughn is a criminal justice reporter with the Sentinel in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and two years ago he started thinking about the information contained within the court documents created every time a person is charged with a crime. Working with a friend, he taught himself to code and built a tool to search those dockets, creating a searchable database that can provide statistics about the crime rate across the state. "Where it all really started is, we're like most newspapers, trying to do more with less people," Vaughn said. "I thought there was a need and there was something there that could help us out. ... As journalists, we have our routines, we have our ways of doing things. We have our data set that we look at, whether crime with dockets or education with reporting of Pennsylvania school profiles. There are things we look at all the time that we use in one way. I wanted to find different ways of using it. It was a matter of trying to take a step back and realize this (information) was there if we could find a way to pull it out." Now Vaughn has been writing one data-driven criminal justice article each month, led by or sourced with information culled from the data scraping tool he created. He wrote an article about people who were arrested on drug-related charges or found to have drug abuse issues when arrested and what happens to those people when they're sentenced to jail time. "I was doing some keyword searches in documents and found several people in there who had died of drug overdoses" while in jail, he said. In December, he wrote an article looking back at what appeared to be a noticeable uptick in the number of dockets opened in Pennsylvania that year, a 500-case increase in a county that normally gets 3,000 to 4,000 criminal filings each year. While it sounds like a big problem and might be cause for concern, Vaughn used the tool he created to determine things weren't really that bad. "DUIs are up substantially, drug crime and arrests were up substantially. The largest portion of drug crime arrests were simple possession, small amount of drugs not for delivery, and people getting charged with possession of small amounts of marijuana," a separate crime in the state, he said. "Those two alone accounted for about 75 percent of the overall caseload increase." The underlying reason for this increase, he determined, was due to a shift in enforcement. "One of the chiefs of police made the point that the county is going through a shift in work staff, with older officers retiring. Younger officers tend to spend more time on the road and they have to do more traffic enforcement. More traffic enforcement leads to more people getting pulled over for DUIs." ? Amber Healy On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Joshua Vaughn, a criminal justice reporter at the Sentinel newspaper in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Vaughn taught himself coding and built tools that allowed him to scrape data from public records. He shares how this information has both supported the reporting he had been already doing and led to new stories about the criminal justice system.

Rachel Leibrock woke up feeling sick on Wednesday, Nov. 9. She thought about calling in sick to her job as the editor of the Sacramento News & Review. But after watching Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, she knew that was unacceptable. There was work to be done. “One of the amazing things about that day was how every single person on my staff came in to talk about what we need to do next, what we do going forward,” she said. “We had these really intense, sometimes teary conversations about what our role was. We got down to brass tacks. OK, we should ditch this story, push it back a week, let’s get an essay in about the election. We ended up ditching our New 1 spread, two full pages, jettisoning that in favor of photos of protests held over the weekend.” Working with a sense of purpose is nothing new to Leibrock, who came to the News & Review after nine years at Sacramento’s daily paper. In 2015, she and her staff developed a project in which philosophers, scientists, reporters and others wrote letters to future generations to address one of two possible actions of the Paris meeting on climate change: Letters reflecting the world if the accord was signed and if it was not. “We offered our letters up for free to other alt weeklies and invited them to solicit their own letters from their community,” Leibrock said. The letters started publishing just before the meeting took place. Hard copies of many of the letters were also presented to the delegates at the Paris meeting in December 2015 before the accord was signed. Dozens of letters were received, so many that the paper had to build a designated website (https://www.letterstothefuture.org) to publish them all. Some of the people who were asked to write letters were hesitant at first and weren’t quite sure what they should say. “We’d have a conversation about just how important the accord is and what the future impact could be, whether signed or not, what kind of planet we want to leave for future generations," she said. "People would get inspired and write these really passionate screeds.” In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Leibrock and her staff decided to revisit that idea, preparing two articles looking at the actions required on climate change both nationally and in California depending on the winner of the election and in light of the Paris accord. While they were “leaning” toward the probability of a Clinton victory, Leibrock asked her reporter, Alastair Bland, if he’d be available the morning after, just in case. She held off writing an email to Bland throughout election night as the returns came in. Instead, he emailed her around 11 p.m., promising her a revised article the next morning. “The story has to be revised a couple of times over the next few days because (Donald) Trump was already looking at particular people to run the EPA, someone considered a climate change skeptic. This story in particular, we told other alt weeklies, could run any time between then and the inauguration. So far I think we’ve had 20 papers pick it up.”

Rachel Leibrock woke up feeling sick on Wednesday, Nov. 9. She thought about calling in sick to her job as the editor of the Sacramento News & Review. But after watching Hillary Clinton's concession speech, she knew that was unacceptable. There was work to be done. "One of the amazing things about that day was how every single person on my staff came in to talk about what we need to do next, what we do going forward," she said. "We had these really intense, sometimes teary conversations about what our role was. We got down to brass tacks. OK, we should ditch this story, push it back a week, let's get an essay in about the election. We ended up ditching our New 1 spread, two full pages, jettisoning that in favor of photos of protests held over the weekend." Working with a sense of purpose is nothing new to Leibrock, who came to the News & Review after nine years at Sacramento's daily paper. In 2015, she and her staff developed a project in which philosophers, scientists, reporters and others wrote letters to future generations to address one of two possible actions of the Paris meeting on climate change: Letters reflecting the world if the accord was signed and if it was not. "We offered our letters up for free to other alt weeklies and invited them to solicit their own letters from their community," Leibrock said. The letters started publishing just before the meeting took place. Hard copies of many of the letters were also presented to the delegates at the Paris meeting in December 2015 before the accord was signed. Dozens of letters were received, so many that the paper had to build a designated website to publish them all. Some of the people who were asked to write letters were hesitant at first and weren't quite sure what they should say. "We'd have a conversation about just how important the accord is and what the future impact could be, whether signed or not, what kind of planet we want to leave for future generations," she said. "People would get inspired and write these really passionate screeds." In the weeks leading up to the 2016 election, Leibrock and her staff decided to revisit that idea, preparing two articles looking at the actions required on climate change both nationally and in California depending on the winner of the election and in light of the Paris accord. While they were "leaning" toward the probability of a Clinton victory, Leibrock asked her reporter, Alastair Bland, if he'd be available the morning after, just in case. She held off writing an email to Bland throughout election night as the returns came in. Instead, he emailed her around 11 p.m., promising her a revised article the next morning. "The story has to be revised a couple of times over the next few days because (Donald) Trump was already looking at particular people to run the EPA, someone considered a climate change skeptic. This story in particular, we told other alt weeklies, could run any time between then and the inauguration. So far I think we've had 20 papers pick it up."

Before pointing too many angry fingers at the supposed phenomenon of fake news, consider the amount of less-than-truthful articles created daily compared to the average amount of stuff on the internet every day. The verdict? Fake news might draw 8 million clicks in three months, but that’s a small overall percentage of what readers are exposed to during a given time, argues Aram Zucker-Scharff, a developer for Salon and a freelance developer for Press Forward. “For sure, fake news is troubling. It’s bad that there are people out there telling lies and painting it as the truth. There’s nothing that is incorrect to be worried about that,” he said. “At the same time, the scale is not as concerning as it’s painted to be.” Buzzfeed (https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.oyPmAWrZb#.yxnQ615g4) estimated that fake news articles had about 8.7 million views over the three months leading up to the 2016 election, but “in comparison to what news organizations and the general internet gets daily, it’s relatively minor,” he said. “I compare it to a John Oliver video which, in the course of two months, gets more than half of that (amount of traffic). Some get more than that. There are John Oliver videos that got more video views, which are more significant than Facebook engagement.” The bottom line is that fake news isn’t news in and of itself, nor is it the massive problem it’s portrayed. What is new, or at least a more recent occurrence, is the use of ads designed to look like legitimate newspaper articles. Sometimes, as in a recent New York Times article (http://digiday.com/publishers/top-publishers-still-stuck-distributing-fake-news/), an ad for a fake news site is embedded into a real news story. “If the media had any issues with this election, it came from our own internal decisions,” Zucker-Scharff said. “I think we were too reliant on polls that were not very symbolic of the electorate. This was perhaps a problem unique in this case because there were a lot of issues and many situations in which people were not willing to admit who they were voting for. Also, there’s a big disconnect between media organizations and smaller towns.” In the past, there were reporters on the ground to call out what was happening from town to town. “We used to have local newspapers out there and now, not so much.” Voters don’t live just in “the media hotspots of D.C. and New York City,” he said. — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Aram Zucker-Scharff about his recent Medium article, The media is a business and journalism is a job. Get it together (https://medium.com/@aramzs/the-media-is-a-business-and-journalism-is-a-job-get-it-together-c1ba78a4df95#.ivtv08xx9)., which examines the perceived threat of fake news and Facebook's recent solution — fact-checking by news outlets like the Associated Press.

Before pointing too many angry fingers at the supposed phenomenon of fake news, consider the amount of less-than-truthful articles created daily compared to the average amount of stuff on the internet every day. The verdict? Fake news might draw 8 million clicks in three months, but that's a small overall percentage of what readers are exposed to during a given time, argues Aram Zucker-Scharff, a developer for Salon and a freelance developer for Press Forward. "For sure, fake news is troubling. It's bad that there are people out there telling lies and painting it as the truth. There's nothing that is incorrect to be worried about that," he said. "At the same time, the scale is not as concerning as it's painted to be." Buzzfeed estimated that fake news articles had about 8.7 million views over the three months leading up to the 2016 election, but "in comparison to what news organizations and the general internet gets daily, it's relatively minor," he said. "I compare it to a John Oliver video which, in the course of two months, gets more than half of that (amount of traffic). Some get more than that. There are John Oliver videos that got more video views, which are more significant than Facebook engagement." The bottom line is that fake news isn't news in and of itself, nor is it the massive problem it's portrayed. What is new, or at least a more recent occurrence, is the use of ads designed to look like legitimate newspaper articles. Sometimes, as in a recent New York Times article, an ad for a fake news site is embedded into a real news story. "If the media had any issues with this election, it came from our own internal decisions," Zucker-Scharff said. "I think we were too reliant on polls that were not very symbolic of the electorate. This was perhaps a problem unique in this case because there were a lot of issues and many situations in which people were not willing to admit who they were voting for. Also, there's a big disconnect between media organizations and smaller towns." In the past, there were reporters on the ground to call out what was happening from town to town. "We used to have local newspapers out there and now, not so much." Voters don't live just in "the media hotspots of D.C. and New York City," he said. ? Amber Healy On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Aram Zucker-Scharff about his recent Medium article, The media is a business and journalism is a job. Get it together., which examines the perceived threat of fake news and Facebook's recent solution ? fact-checking by news outlets like the Associated Press.

Jessica Abel approaches her work as a cartoonist in the way a writer would approach putting words on a page. Telling a good story in either format, just as writing fiction or non-fiction, requires many of the same skills. “Good writing is good writing, to a certain extent,” said Abel, an author, cartoonist and podcaster, who started writing comics in college and tried her hand at illustrating a non-fiction strip for the New City paper in Chicago in the early 1990s. She started drawing comics after reading Love and Rockets, which inspired her. “Instead of just being a reader, I wanted to be a maker,” she recalled. “It was the first thing I read that dealt with real people, real stories in the real world.” That impulse has served her well over the years, leading her to experiment with telling stories combining written words with comics. “Comics, like all art forms, have strengths and weaknesses,” including the ability to compress many concepts and events into a single scene or image. The use of word bubbles can help a reader fall into the pace of a story, speeding up or slowing down in rhythm with the story’s action. On the other hand, if a single narrator is in the middle of a monologue, in comics that could take pages and pages of illustration and the reader could get bored, she said. There are elements of comics that work really well in prose, however. When she decided to revisit Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a book she wrote with This American Life host Ira Glass, she wanted to expand on some of the original concepts and get into the weeds a bit more on the secrets of radio producers and how good radio programs are made. “If you want to make audio that’s as strong as you hear on Radiolab or This American Life, these are the things these people look for,” Abel said. One of her favorite aspects of writing her recent graphic novel on audio storytelling, Out on The Wire (http://jessicaabel.com/out-on-the-wire/), was “translating this entirely audio medium to images, crafting metaphors for audio things. I think visual metaphors are incredibly instructive on how comics work. I knew I wanted to do this: Embedded in this book is what’s important for narrative, not just audio.” For example, in one passage, a character she calls “Meta Ira,” named for Glass, pops into a scene in which soundtracking is discussed, the way in which music can be cut out of the background to let an important message stand out. “Ira pops in front and says, 'This is amazing. It’s totally true.' When something’s important, you drop everything else out and you shine a light on it,” she said. “In the panel where he says it’s like dropping a light on it, I drop everything except Ira. The panels above are super busy. It’s very clearly like he’s spotlighted. It’s a way of talking about storytelling in general. How do you translate that to prose? I don’t know but I’m sure you could. Almost everything I do, when I talk about narrative in this way, has analogs in other media. I’m really interested in talking about those analogs and how to do things better.” On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to cartoonist Jessica Abel about the differences and surprising similarities in audio and graphic storytelling. Abel is the author of Out on The Wire (http://jessicaabel.com/out-on-the-wire/), a graphic novel about the storytelling techniques behind the popular Radiolab and This American Life radio shows.

Jessica Abel approaches her work as a cartoonist in the way a writer would approach putting words on a page. Telling a good story in either format, just as writing fiction or non-fiction, requires many of the same skills. "Good writing is good writing, to a certain extent," said Abel, an author, cartoonist and podcaster, who started writing comics in college and tried her hand at illustrating a non-fiction strip for the New City paper in Chicago in the early 1990s. She started drawing comics after reading Love and Rockets, which inspired her. "Instead of just being a reader, I wanted to be a maker," she recalled. "It was the first thing I read that dealt with real people, real stories in the real world." That impulse has served her well over the years, leading her to experiment with telling stories combining written words with comics. "Comics, like all art forms, have strengths and weaknesses," including the ability to compress many concepts and events into a single scene or image. The use of word bubbles can help a reader fall into the pace of a story, speeding up or slowing down in rhythm with the story's action. On the other hand, if a single narrator is in the middle of a monologue, in comics that could take pages and pages of illustration and the reader could get bored, she said. There are elements of comics that work really well in prose, however. When she decided to revisit Radio: An Illustrated Guide, a book she wrote with This American Life host Ira Glass, she wanted to expand on some of the original concepts and get into the weeds a bit more on the secrets of radio producers and how good radio programs are made. "If you want to make audio that's as strong as you hear on Radiolab or This American Life, these are the things these people look for," Abel said. One of her favorite aspects of writing her recent graphic novel on audio storytelling, Out on The Wire, was "translating this entirely audio medium to images, crafting metaphors for audio things. I think visual metaphors are incredibly instructive on how comics work. I knew I wanted to do this: Embedded in this book is what's important for narrative, not just audio." For example, in one passage, a character she calls "Meta Ira," named for Glass, pops into a scene in which soundtracking is discussed, the way in which music can be cut out of the background to let an important message stand out. "Ira pops in front and says, 'This is amazing. It's totally true.' When something's important, you drop everything else out and you shine a light on it," she said. "In the panel where he says it's like dropping a light on it, I drop everything except Ira. The panels above are super busy. It's very clearly like he's spotlighted. It's a way of talking about storytelling in general. How do you translate that to prose? I don't know but I'm sure you could. Almost everything I do, when I talk about narrative in this way, has analogs in other media. I'm really interested in talking about those analogs and how to do things better." On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to cartoonist Jessica Abel about the differences and surprising similarities in audio and graphic storytelling. Abel is the author of Out on The Wire, a graphic novel about the storytelling techniques behind the popular Radiolab and This American Life radio shows.

Every journalist comes to their respective newsroom in a different way, but almost all have a similar starting point: a high school English teacher. For this week's podcast, the three producers discussed their trials and tribulations in the newsroom, trying to find the humor and personality in covering the federal government and how to go about covering difficult stories in which reporters are treated as hostile witnesses to painful events. But mostly, it's a discussion of the vast variety of odd news stories they've covered over their careers. There's the time Michael O'Connell went to a Star Trek collectable card game tournament. "The card company had released a set of new cards a few days before the event. Some of the people, who were very smart card players, realized there was a fault in the mechanism they'd introduced in this set. They were just cleaning up and knocking out all these people who'd spent months and months strategizing how they were going to win this thing. There was all this emotional turmoil going back and forth over this little card game. That was what the story was." Or when the Miss Springfield Pageant in Springfield, Virginia, crowned a winner on a Thursday night and, by Friday morning, the winner's crown was in danger of being revoked. By the time the newspaper's new issue went out a week later, a different queen was crowned and the pageant never took place again. It's still one of Amber Healy's favorite stories to recount. For Nicole Ogrysko, one of her first journalism projects was covering the efforts to raise money for new cafeteria chairs. The headline on the story, "25 grand? I'd rather stand!" remains a fond memory. In her college newspaper, a series on the school's cafeteria company may or may not have resulted in the service workers getting a well-deserved raise that she swears is not directly linked to her team's reporting. "That was a huge learning opportunity for me. At that point, I didn't know how to go up and talk to people and say hey, can you give me this thing you're not allowed to give me," she said.

Every journalist comes to their respective newsroom in a different way, but almost all have a similar starting point: a high school English teacher. For this week’s podcast, the three producers discussed their trials and tribulations in the newsroom, trying to find the humor and personality in covering the federal government and how to go about covering difficult stories in which reporters are treated as hostile witnesses to painful events. But mostly, it’s a discussion of the vast variety of odd news stories they’ve covered over their careers. There’s the time Michael O’Connell went to a Star Trek collectable card game tournament. “The card company had released a set of new cards a few days before the event. Some of the people, who were very smart card players, realized there was a fault in the mechanism they’d introduced in this set. They were just cleaning up and knocking out all these people who’d spent months and months strategizing how they were going to win this thing. There was all this emotional turmoil going back and forth over this little card game. That was what the story was.” Or when the Miss Springfield Pageant in Springfield, Virginia, crowned a winner on a Thursday night and, by Friday morning, the winner’s crown was in danger of being revoked. By the time the newspaper’s new issue went out a week later, a different queen was crowned and the pageant never took place again. It’s still one of Amber Healy’s favorite stories to recount. For Nicole Ogrysko, one of her first journalism projects was covering the efforts to raise money for new cafeteria chairs. The headline on the story, “25 grand? I’d rather stand!” remains a fond memory. In her college newspaper, a series on the school’s cafeteria company may or may not have resulted in the service workers getting a well-deserved raise that she swears is not directly linked to her team’s reporting. “That was a huge learning opportunity for me. At that point, I didn’t know how to go up and talk to people and say hey, can you give me this thing you’re not allowed to give me," she said.

Much noise has been made in recent weeks about the proliferation of "fake" or misleading news during the last election cycle. One professor has decided to try to help her students discern real, reputable sources from less-than-truthful ones and, like the old saying goes, it's not gone unpunished. Melissa Zimdars is an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts and had been talking with her students about not only fake news but articles that were misleading or contained a mix of real and not-quite-real facts. "In a lot of ways, I was more concerned about a gray area of news that combines elements of truth with exaggeration or other kinds of falsities," she said. It's not just a Republican issue or a Democratic one; something conservatives fall prey to more often than liberals or vice versa. "It's an issue across the political spectrum," Zimdars said. "A lot of news entities have been interviewing creators of fake news sites and they're saying liberals just don't circulate fake news in the same way conservatives do, suggesting they were creating information to be circulated by people who identified as conservative." That some pundits, talking head and political commenters are pointing to fake or misleading news articles as a factor in this year's presidential election is purely a matter of good timing, Zimdars says. To help her students, Zimdars created a list, originally shared with her students via Google Docs, outlining the difference between "outright fake news sites, like 70news.wordpress.com" but also "sites that are generally misleading or may contain a lot of unreliable information, but they generally report on actual news, even if their style isn't in a news style or relies on clickbait." The real risk of misleading information is that it can be shared on social networks by people who are trusted, reliable news professionals. "Even my liberal friends on Facebook, who are journalists and teach journalism, I was looking at sites they were circulating for years in question," she said. When starting work on what became her list - she originally envisioned a searchable document for her students and other journalists to use— she realized the sites in question generally fell into one of three categories: "The first category is just fake. The ones coming from Macedonia, or maybe being created in the U.S. for various reasons. They basically have no verifiable information (and they) may be directly counter to the facts and evidence reported by other news publications." The second category is "gray" sites that combine news and opinion, where it's "not always clear to readers and watchers of these websites" what's real and what's manufactured. The third category is "clickbait stuff, which can include a lot of mainstream publications and news organizations for various reasons. That's why, ultimately, the resource needs to span the whole continuum of news organizations. These have verifiable and reliable information, even if it's coming from a political perspective." It's tough out there for journalists and, possibly, even more so for students just starting out. But fake or misleading information makes it tough for reporters as well as consumers. "There's enough truthful stuff happening to be angry or concerned about," she said. "We don't really need to also put out false information that, if anything, drowns out what we should be talking about." — Amber Healy On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, hosts Michael O'Connell and Nicole Ogrysko talk to Melissa Zimdars, an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College, about the online list she created documenting fake news sites. The...

Much noise has been made in recent weeks about the proliferation of “fake” or misleading news during the last election cycle. One professor has decided to try to help her students discern real, reputable sources from less-than-truthful ones and, like the old saying goes, it’s not gone unpunished. Melissa Zimdars is an associate professor in the department of communications at Merrimack College in Massachusetts and had been talking with her students about not only fake news but articles that were misleading or contained a mix of real and not-quite-real facts. “In a lot of ways, I was more concerned about a gray area of news that combines elements of truth with exaggeration or other kinds of falsities,” she said. It’s not just a Republican issue or a Democratic one; something conservatives fall prey to more often than liberals or vice versa. “It’s an issue across the political spectrum,” Zimdars said. “A lot of news entities have been interviewing creators of fake news sites and they’re saying liberals just don’t circulate fake news in the same way conservatives do, suggesting they were creating information to be circulated by people who identified as conservative.” That some pundits, talking head and political commenters are pointing to fake or misleading news articles as a factor in this year’s presidential election is purely a matter of good timing, Zimdars says. To help her students, Zimdars created a list (http://itsalljournalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Resource-False-Misleading-Clickbait-y-and-Satirical-%E2%80%9CNews%E2%80%9D-Sources.pdf), originally shared with her students via Google Docs, outlining the difference between “outright fake news sites, like 70news.wordpress.com” but also “sites that are generally misleading or may contain a lot of unreliable information, but they generally report on actual news, even if their style isn’t in a news style or relies on clickbait.” The real risk of misleading information is that it can be shared on social networks by people who are trusted, reliable news professionals. “Even my liberal friends on Facebook, who are journalists and teach journalism, I was looking at sites they were circulating for years in question,” she said. When starting work on what became her list – she originally envisioned a searchable document for her students and other journalists to use— she realized the sites in question generally fell into one of three categories: “The first category is just fake. The ones coming from Macedonia, or maybe being created in the U.S. for various reasons. They basically have no verifiable information (and they) may be directly counter to the facts and evidence reported by other news publications.” The second category is “gray” sites that combine news and opinion, where it’s “not always clear to readers and watchers of these websites” what’s real and what’s manufactured. The third category is “clickbait stuff, which can include a lot of mainstream publications and news organizations for various reasons. That’s why, ultimately, the resource needs to span the whole continuum of news organizations. These have verifiable and reliable information, even if it’s coming from a political perspective.” It’s tough out there for journalists and, possibly, even more so for students just starting out. But fake or misleading information makes it tough for reporters as well as consumers. “There’s enough truthful stuff happening to be angry or concerned about,” she said. “We don’t really need to also put out false information that, if anything, drowns out what we should be talking about." — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast,

A city with a strong daily newspaper that doesn’t always prioritize local news; a journalism school full of students living in a thriving city telling stories that might not be read outside their professor’s office. Problem? Meet solutio...

He’s moved from processing his own film in a dark room to creating dream-like, blurry-edged digital images, but Darrow Montgomery’s muse is, was and will remain his hometown of Washington, D.C. Now celebrating his 30th anniversary at the Washington City Paper, Montgomery’s relationship with photography began like so many others do: “In high school I had to pick an elective and the girl I was interested in picked photography, so I picked photography too.” With a good-natured chuckle, Montgomery said the relationship went nowhere — with the girl. “The first roll of film, the magical thing developing under your eyes. That was that,” he said As a student at the Corcoran School of Art, he needed an internship and, fully enamored with photography by then, Montgomery figured he’d get a gig at the City Paper, which he imagined would look like the newsrooms he saw on TV. “I went over to it and it was a row house on 6th Street,” he says. “There was no darkroom. There were people sitting in the bedrooms, which were made into offices.” The people in charge at the time gave him a chance and, “next thing I knew I was shooting an assignment and I was shooting a cover story and I was doing it very poorly. I was terrified. I’d bring every camera I had amassed in my young life on assignment with me on a bicycle and a tripod I didn’t use or need, but I figured if I had the tool with me, I could answer the bigger problems.” Now all he needs is either his smartphone or a camera with a 60mm lens. Of course, that’s not all that’s changed in his three decades at the paper. The city he loves so much is changing in a hurry. “The pace of change seems to have accelerated,” Montgomery said. “It’s had sleepy, bombed-out sections from the riots, places you wouldn’t go at night, places that would be dead at night, to a place that I wouldn’t recognize 20 years ago. The sort of population influx, the development the condo on every corner, the whole character has changed. The old 9:30 Club is a J. Crew.” He points to a self-assigned project looking at Georgia Avenue from the Maryland line to Howard University in D.C. “It’s one of the few corridors that still looks the same as it did 30 years ago. It’s changing in pockets.” To capture the nature of the avenue, he rode buses back and forth on the strip, walked sections of it, drove himself around. “My intent was to make interesting pictures of that corridor. That was maybe three years ago. If I go back to some of those spots today, they’re gone.” — Amber Healy (mailto:phfyrebyrd@gmail.com) On this week's It's All Journalism podcast, host Michael O'Connell talks to Darrow Montgomery about his 30 years as a photographer for the Washington City Paper (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com). Montgomery talks about how his work evolved as the city he covered changed. He tells how he went from film to digital, from black and white to color, and shares some tricks on how to make a piece of food look amazing in print.